tter of fact, written for
theatres in which there were to be not actors but marionettes, singers
being engaged to sing the lines out of sight while the puppets
depicted the characters. Some of these dramas have, since they were
written, been adapted for the ordinary stage and the characters
portrayed by Japan's most famous actors. The theatre was long looked
down upon and it is only of comparatively recent years that it has
been looking up. A large number of persons in this country still
appear to be under the impression that there are no actresses on the
Japanese stage. This is, of course, a mistake, caused no doubt by the
fact that in Japanese theatres the female characters in a play are so
often impersonated by men. Some two or three centuries back actors and
actresses used, as in Europe, to play in the same piece, but this was
for some reason or other interdicted, and ever since there have been
companies composed of men and women respectively. In the male
companies some of the female parts naturally fell to men and in the
female companies the male parts were of necessity depicted by women.
Of recent years the tendency is to revert to the ancient practice and
to come into line with the custom of European countries in this
matter, and ere long, no doubt in Japanese theatres the female
characters will be taken by women and the male characters by men.

The theatre has always been a popular institution in Japan, and the
pieces usually played have very much the same _motif_ as the dramas
formerly so popular in this country--the discomfiture of the villain
and the triumph of virtue. The Japanese theatre does not appeal to the
ordinary European visitor, or indeed to many Europeans living in the
country. In the first place, the performance is too long for the
European taste, and in the next, most Japanese plays are of one kind,
and concerned with one period--the feudal. There is, moreover, a
plethora of by-play--sword exercise and acrobatic performances--which
have nothing whatever to do with the plot of the piece. In fact,
irrelevancy appears to the European the chief characteristic of what
he sees on the stage of a Japanese theatre. Nor does the play, as is
usual in serious dramas in this country, revolve round one character,
the hero or heroine. Indeed it is not always easy to earmark, so to
speak, the leading character, and it is occasionally doubtful in many
Japanese plays whether there is any hero or heroine. But the s